Twelve Animal Scientists, from Norfolk Estates to the Cattle Genome

Coke inherited a 30,000 acre Norfolk estate and is historically credited with sparking the British Agricultural Revolution at Holkham, though historians such as R. A. C. Parker attribute many of the innovations to his predecessors in Norfolk. He is the right place to begin because his story shows how credit for improvement is argued over.

Lush is sometimes called the father of modern scientific animal breeding. He argued for breeding livestock on quantitative statistics and genetic information rather than on how an animal looked, and his 1937 textbook Animal Breeding Plans influenced breeders worldwide.

Blaxter was an animal nutritionist who directed the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen from 1965. At the Hannah Dairy Research Institute he wrote more than 200 papers, mostly on energy metabolism and feed use by ruminants, and he received the 1979 Wolf Prize in Agriculture for work on the nutritional requirements of ruminant livestock.

In 1950 Polge produced the first chicks from eggs fertilised with frozen sperm, the first vertebrates made that way. Two years later he reported high pregnancy rates in cattle from sperm frozen for more than a year, work that made frozen semen practical for livestock artificial insemination.

Almquist set up the Dairy Breeding Research Center at Penn State in 1949. He showed that antibiotics added to bull semen reduced bacterial growth and improved fertility, and found that milk could serve as a medium for preserving bull semen, both of which helped dairy artificial insemination.

Lardy was a biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studied cellular metabolism. He also played an important part in developing methods for storing and preserving semen, which aided artificial insemination of livestock, and he received the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 1981.

Bazer studies the signaling between an embryo and its mother that maintains pregnancy in livestock species. His research identified interferon-tau and other pregnancy-associated proteins, and he also identified uteroferrin, so his work bears on both livestock production and human reproductive health.

Plowright devoted his career to eradicating the cattle plague rinderpest. Working in Kenya and Nigeria he adapted cell culture techniques from polio vaccine work to produce a live attenuated tissue culture rinderpest vaccine, which earned him the 1999 World Food Prize, and rinderpest became the first animal disease eliminated worldwide.

Womack, a professor at Texas A&M University from 1973, was responsible for a whole genome cattle-hamster radiation hybrid panel, a tool that advanced cattle genome mapping and comparative genomics. He shared the 2001 Wolf Prize in Agriculture with Roger N. Beachy.

Georges, a Belgian professor at the University of Liege, develops tools and strategies that make genome analysis more efficient for livestock improvement. His work identified genes behind single traits such as polledness and double-muscling and behind complex traits such as milk yield, fertility and disease resistance.

Andersson is a Swedish animal geneticist at Uppsala University whose team mapped the pig genome in 2012. He also reads the genomes of pigs, horses and chickens for what they reveal about the history of domestication, and he shared the 2014 Wolf Prize in Agriculture with Jorge Dubcovsky.

Grandin designed curved cattle-handling corrals and chutes, now used industry-wide, intended to reduce stress, panic and injury in animals led to slaughter. She has written more than sixty scientific papers on animal behavior, and the path ends with her because it turns from how animals are produced to how they are handled.